Category Archives: Philosophy

It seems that this past September, Mark Cousins, creator of The Story of Film: An Odyssey, published an intriguing manifesto calling for a re-evaluation of values and aims among the film festival programmers of the world that is just beginning to emerge within the online film community (I only discovered it this past week courtesy of MUBI’s Notebook). You can view and save it in .PDF form here; I for one, as someone who loves to attend and cover film festivals when I can, am definitely in support of this document’s spirit of adventure and call for positive change in the rather insular world of film festivals. Whenever I go to a film festival, it’s not just the films that draw me in, but also all the other delights that that specific experience can offer. Thus, I am all for the inclusiveness, creativity, sense of identity, and close-knit, communal vibe that make film festivals so special and that Cousins is beseeching fest organizers to not lose sight of.

Here is an experiment. Take the name of six colours, write them in random order several times using a coloured pen that does not match the name of the colour. Time yourself reading this list of colours. Write the same list of colours using only black ink and time yourself reading the list. The mind works is strange ways, and has trouble if preconceived associations to familiar things or objects get too close to one another. Daniel Cockburn, a Toronto video artist has just made a wild and crazy jump into features with a film-slash-brain-experiment that wants to perform a witty and colourful brain massage. He wants to play with your cerebellum in the same way that the perception of film works: ‘Persistence of Vision’ as shutters push single frames to form the illusion of movement. We will ignore the contradiction that he mainly shoots on video. Contradictions are what the film is about.

Cockburn wants to expand your consciousness or provide the illusion of expanding your consciousness or expand your consciousness while providing the illusion that he has not. You Are Here. The statement is both a location as well as a confirmation of existence. Different things, really. The red dot that defines your location on the map can be just as much of a misleader as a guide. The meaning of the film goes beyond the dual-nature of the title into something that is both profound and a profoundly funny. It is science. It is art. It is absurd and hilarious sleight-of-hand. It is an ultra lo-fi version of Inception in which the filmmakers might as well be Leonardo Di Caprio and company (in shabbier clothing mind-you) and the audience are simultaneously the beneficiary of planted ideas and the mark of a baffling grift. The TIFF catalogue labels the film as Dr. Seuss meets Samuel Beckett, and I cannot really argue with that. It is an apt a description as you are going to get without telling you much. When it ended after an all too brief 75 minutes, I was upset. I wanted to see how many more times the filmmakers could fold their narrative in upon itself while keeping me in its spell. Riding the wave, before it collapsed. Like any good performer, Cockburn knows to keep the audience wanting more. Or they ran out of money, drugs or the ability to keep a hold of the reigns. I am sure the director will never tell.Would you like to know more…?

There are two free-floating ideas on the film blogosphere that I would like to call out as bullshit, and my hope is that the more they are recognized as bullshit the less people will cling to them. I see them as the ‘all or nothing’ approaches. They are as follows:

1) Film taste is wholly subjective, so nothing is debatable

2) Film taste is wholly objective, so everything is debatable

Nothing kills a thread faster than someone proclaiming that all debate is futile because ‘film is subjective’. By this logic, the forum that exists is just a depository of self-contained opinions that need not even brush up against each other, lest they be challenged in any way. On the flipside, you have the predatorial approach based on the assumption that ‘everything is debatable’ including how a person must feel about the film. Sometimes this is just trolling, but more often than not it is a genuine presumption of knowing how everyone must feel. These are the extremes and unfortunately they play out on occasion on Row Three, hence my desire to put a spotlight on them.

Despite the obvious subjective quality to personal taste, opinions can co-exist, healthy debate can happen. For some, this will be glaringly obvious, but take a look at any movie forum and time and again you will see that this farce does play out. Still it takes all kinds, and there is certainly a benefit when aggressive types stick their neck out for people to get agitated enough to join in (we at Row Three have a knack for doing that, i.e. the Signs water theory, the politics of Milk), but after the ball gets rolling things tend to fall apart because somewhere, someone neglects how exactly we relate to film, and how film relates to our lives. There are useful boundaries that we can hold to, to keep the insightful threads ricocheting into the hundreds.

First, lets do away with this fallacy that film is subjective and therefore everyone is right. This is not kindergarten. At its best, a film community can be a place to confront your feelings, articulate them, come to some conclusion that you would not have independently. While there are indisputable aspects to one’s opinion (i.e. your emotional response), the causes are not so indisputable and can and should be challenged. There is a tendency for people to get upset when told that they do not feel what they feel, and it’s usually the fault of the accuser missing their mark; what is meant is not that someone does not feel the way they do, but rather the justifications for why they feel that way rings false. Would you like to know more…?

Recent Comments

Jonathan: I always get Millennium Films and Millenium Entertainment mixed up… but both distribute complete trash with some impressive star power. I’m sure these films are relatively high paychecks with short filming commitments and minimal press. Can’t blame...

Jonathan Hardesty: Well, and comparing those films and directors in the context of the new Godzilla film is more interesting than just doling out a star rating and saying that Godzilla was either “good” or “bad.” Or at least I find that discussion more...

Arnold Schizopolis: While watching a film, I often find myself trying to figure out the filmmaker’s vision (themes, concepts and/or thesis) and by the end, wonder if he or she was successful. That’s more challenging for me than whether the film met my expectations....

Jonathan: Yeah, Harrison’s career since ’97 has been astonishing in how much it contrasts with the rest of his career. In the 14 movies he’s starred in since Air Force One, every movie has been god-awful–except 42, which I appreciate for the moderately...

Andrew James: So I like Blade Runner quite a bit – though I seem to be in a minority of people that don’t absolutely adore it. Next Incendies blew me away while Prisoners did very little for me and Enemy was arguably the worst movie of the year. So Villeneuve (for...

Jonathan: In ’95, a Blade Runner sequel came out as a novel – Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human. I bought it for fifty cents with its cover ripped off at a five ‘n dime. I liked it then, although I was also ten years old–and Deckard was not a replicant...

Rick Vance: It adds to the bleak and overbearing nature of the world and the motives and behaviors of the police office if people who are ‘Blade Runner’ hunt without that knowledge (It also isn’t a question so I am glad we all dodged that bullet). (I agree...

kurt: One Last thing: http://badassdigest.com/2015/0 2/27/do-androids-dream-of-blad e-runner-making-sense “In turning dick’s novel into a film (if paul sammon’s book “future noir” is to be believed) hampton fancher wrote a line in a draft either very late in...

Andrew James: What Kurt said. I don’t take so much “stock” out of it as it just happens to have a lot of classic blind spots for me. Out of the 250, there were about 42 that I hadn’t seen which is just about exactly how many Cinecasts we do per year so...

Kurt Halfyard: He talked about it on the show, it’s as good a populist list as any, and easy to find. A mixture of arthouse (La Strada, Fanny And Alexander, L’Avventura) and populist (Shawshank Redemption, Godfather, American Beauty) as well as old (Gold Rush, Rear...

Rick Vance: I am surprised Andrew has so much stock in the imdb top 250.

Matt Gamble: I don’t think I called it exciting outside of a direct comparison to the fucking Oscars, but I still do find it fun. NXT is a waaaaay better product than Raw or Smackdown , and I watch Ring of Honor on occasion (going to a house show later this month). I...

Craig: I can’t believe Matt thinks WWE is still exciting, I still watch it out a weird sense of obligation more than anything else. He should get on Independent companies like Pro Wrestling Guerilla where his mind would be blown. https://www.youtube.com/wat...

Sean Kelly: I couldn’t disagree more with Andrew on WYRMWOOD, which I had quite a lot of fun watching at Toronto After Dark (it’s definitely a film that must be seen theatrically with a crowd). In my opinion, it’s not “just another zombie movie”...

Dean Speir: I clearly like Miller’s Crossing a great deal more than you do (and am in vociferous disagreement with your affection for that faker Brian DePalma!), and I think one of the problems is that you’re unfamiliar with the novels of Dashiell Hammett,...

Jandy Hardesty: I have the whole Keaton Blu-ray set from Kino. I’ve watched like three shorts from it, and that’s it. I was planning to mainline it when Karina was born, but guess what – silent films do not work well when you’re sleep-deprived, not even...

Bob Turnbull: I thought there were some funny bits to the underwater sequence – fencing with a swordfish (using another swordfish), the men at work sign, the rinsing of a pot with water while underwater, etc. Not uproarious stuff (and, to be honest, not up to the level I...

Jandy Hardesty: I watched The Navigator for my Blind Spot series a couple of years ago – I liked the meet cute sequences between Keaton and the girl the best (the fumbling around the kitchen, and then the incredible devices they rigged up eventually). The underwater...

Andrew James: J.K. Simmons was pretty much declared the winner of best supporting actor since the movie was released. It’s been a lock since day one; everyone knew it. Moore has always been a pretty safe bet as well.

Matt Gamble: Yeah, but I’ve had years to cultivate this idiotic persona.

Matt Gamble: You’re entering into a world of pain, Andrew. Until you have some actual relevant data to measure it is pointless to declare who or what the Oscar favorite is. You know, stats and such. Calling out an Oscar favorite before anyone has placed a single vote is...

Sean Kelly: The most ironic Best Song performance was Maroon 5 performing “Lost Stars,” since it’s actually a plot point in BEGIN AGAIN that the version performed by Adam Levine is overproduced. For comparison, here is the (better) version of the song from...

David Brook: I didn’t see the awards so can’t comment on the performance there, but I totally agree with Andrew’s comment about it being used in the film. It didn’t settle right at all in context. I thought it was almost as clunkily tacked on as the...